


Herding Cats

by formerlydf



Category: Home (2015), Lilo & Stitch (2002)
Genre: Future Fic, Gen, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 10:28:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13052157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/formerlydf/pseuds/formerlydf
Summary: An intergalactic traveler and her small purple best friend, another intergalactic traveler and her small blue best friend, a spaceship crash, a missing cat, and a little bit of trouble. (Okay, a lot of trouble.)





	Herding Cats

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ErinPtah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ErinPtah/gifts).



> Many thanks to M for looking over the draft. Zero thanks to my wifi for failing at a nearly crucial moment.
> 
> To erinptah — this was such a great prompt and I was so excited to fill it! I hope you'll excuse my complete lack of knowledge of the show or the book.

Tip is practicing her deep breathing. 

“So given all of those reasonings elaborate, impossible it is of course that the Cnath will stay on this ship so-called—”

Deep breathing.

“Never an idea good in the place first, dangerous highly, fine perfectly the Cnath are as we are, in fact up I looked the day other and thought, really why would we need this when fine so we are—”

Deep. Breathing.

“It is you who were calling us!” Oh bursts out, literally glowing in his outrage.

The ambassador is backing away from the vidscreen, all three of her hands locked guiltily behind her back. “Yes, and I don’t know what the others were thinking…”

“Ambassador Deylitona-view-axon, nothing has changed,” Tip says, as reassuringly as possible. “All of the precautions you insisted on are still in place. There’s a separate quarter of the ship that no one but the Cnath and I can enter, you had two days to examine the ship—”

Ambassador Deylitona-view-axon is almost all the way across the hall, her voice a tiny squeak as she opens the door behind her. “We changed our minds!”

The door is far away from the vidscreen microphone, but the Cnath’s video equipment is good enough that Tip and Oh can still hear her clearly — and hear another sound, too. If Tip were asked to write it phonetically, she would write “mrrowlll!” If Tip were asked to describe it, she would say, “Well, that sounds exactly like the noise Pig makes when he’s being picked up and dragged somewhere he doesn’t want to go.”

Tip and Oh stare at each other, then the screen. The ambassador hastily backs through the door and shuts it behind her. A second later, the connection shuts off.

“I… didn’t just imagine that, right?” Tip asks.

Oh hesitates. “I has not seen Pig cat recently,” he says. 

They look at each other for a second. Tip says, so quickly she’s not even sure she’s comprehensible, “You follow their ship, I’ll get the cat treats and look in his favorite places just in case—”

“I am being on it!” Oh yells, already scurrying to the helm as fast as his pods can take him.

Tip runs.

-

Nobody in the Galactic Diplomacy and Crisis Core had thought the Cnath government would ever agree to mediation. 

The Cnath were notoriously picky; when they'd joined the Federation, they’d delayed trade agreements for years because they weren’t sure how they felt about the manners of the first envoys. They were so picky, in fact, that they’d created world-changing technology specifically so that they could slowly shift their neighboring continent Primu farther and farther away until they could no longer see it on the horizon. Apparently it ruined their sunsets.

The Prim had been making official complaints for months, but the gears of intergalactic bureaucracy were slow, and it was hard to get anything done when one of the parties involved refused to admit that there was a problem. While the higher-ups at the GDCC were debating whether to and how best to get involved in a local matter, a small group of Prim had taken matters into their own hands — well, their clawed appendages — and created their own astonishing technology in order to turn every single leaf on every single tree and bush in Cnathan an alarmingly vivid shade of chartreuse. 

The Cnath hated chartreuse so much that it had been banned on Cnathan for fifty years. 

The Cnath government had immediately called for the GDCC to arrest the perpetrators — a complicated demand, given that:

  * the GDCC isn't actually a law enforcement agency
  * Galactic law specifically has no provisions about breaking and re-coloring because it has such vastly different meanings on different planets
  * and, most importantly, by the laws of both Cnathan and Primu, any crime with a justified and evidence-supported motive is not legally considered a crime.



But on Cnath, of course, the Chartreuse Attack wasn’t considered justified. On Primu it was. 

When the GDCC told Premier Silas that they couldn't arrest anyone, she had reluctantly agreed to have a consultant sent out — and then promptly rejected the first three on sight. Tip had been the only one reluctantly accepted, maybe because Earth was a new enough member of the Federation that Premier Silas didn't know anything to dismiss her for.

After that, the GDCC had warned Cnath officials that if they made the process unreasonably difficult, the GDCC would leave and the Cnath would have to deal with their problems peacefully and independently. Which means that taking Pig was important enough for the Ambassador to screw up all their chances of de-chartreusing their country.

Sometimes Tip wishes she’d gone into a nice, uncomplicated job. Like rocket science. Or assassination. Or running an intergalactic fight club.

-

When Tip skids back to the bridge twelve minutes later, she’s fuming.

“They kidnapped! My cat!” she yells before she’s even gotten through the entryway. “They are catnappers! I can’t believe we showed up to try and resolve their stupid conflict with their stupid neighbors and they steal my cat!”

Ten years since the Boov invasion, more than two of which have been spent on Official Space Diplomacy Crisis Negotiation Aliens Being Ridiculously Demanding business and the rest of which have been spent on _unofficial_ Space Diplomacy Crisis Negotiation Aliens Being Ridiculously Demanding business, and she hasn’t been this furious since the Boov took her mom. Even that time when the Fliari mountain-gnues took Oh and strung him up by one pod wasn’t this bad, especially since Oh was halfway to annoying them to giving up by the time she arrived.

“Tip,” Oh says, “I think we are having another problem!”

He’s dashing back and forth from one console to another, flipping levers and toggling switches and pressing buttons that release tiny bubbles everywhere, which is the worst sign of all. The bubbles mean serious business.

“What’s going on?” Tip asks, jumping into her seat and trying to get a read on the control panel. “They — why are we in the _Antennae Cascade_? That’s like a million miles out of their way!”

“They know we are giving them the tail!” Oh shouts.

“Yeah, and they’re giving us the slip,” Tip says grimly, and buckles in. “Ready?”

“Ready!”

She’s worked with Oh over ten years and several varieties of flying vehicles, from Slushious (much beloved, frequently repaired, currently parked in Chicago for her mom’s use) to Bubblore (Tip’s college ride, also her college housing, prone to leaving glitter everywhere and thus retired after graduation) to their current ride, Biggety (Oh’s interpretation of what a Galactic Federation-approved meeting ship should look like, complete with fully-sized guest quarters, two disco balls, and an engine that runs on bubblegum and the plastic things you get on six-packs of soda). In that time, they’ve only gotten better at piloting together. Tip can check on the drive and know Oh is taking care of navigation; when he needs one of the doohickeys for the targeting beam, she’s got it in his hand before he even starts reaching out. When the Cnath brake suddenly, as unexpected as it is, Tip and Oh are there at once to slow Biggety down without overshooting the Cnath ship.

“Why did they stop?” Tip asks, frowning. “They haven’t opened up the video connection again.”

“I am having a bad feeling about this,” Oh says slowly.

A tiny _ping_ sounds from across the room. “Oh, the high speed radar!” Tip shouts, which is exactly when the third ship that appeared out of nowhere crashes into them.

-

They don’t get knocked out of the sky, mostly because it’s really hard to get knocked out of space when space is so big. They do get flipped over three times and knocked way off their flight path, and while Tip and Oh are busy clinging to their chairs as the artificial gravity briefly goes haywire, the Cnath zoom out of sight.

Which is probably what they wanted to happen all along. 

Biggety tilts backwards one last time before finally stabilizing, and Tip and Oh sprawl in their seats with matching exhausted sighs. There’s a moment of silence, and then the Talking Box — they’d had a minor disagreement over what to name it which neither of them had won — buzzes repeatedly. Orange, green, and blue lights flash around it, which means that it’s not someone on their list of contacts.

“Do we have to,” Tip groans, trying to drag herself upright again. She has much greater sympathy for how maracas and frisbees feel right now.

“It is the ship that hit us,” Oh says, peering at the screen on the arm of his chair.

The ensuing surge of outrage is almost enough to distract Tip from her lingering aches and pains. “I’m gonna kill them!” she says, and then immediately regrets it, slumping down again. “Ughhhh. That is going to _ruin_ our insurance.”

“Maybe they are being sorry?” Oh asks. He sounds dubious. 

“Maybe they are being assholes,” Tip mutters, but she accepts the call. “Consultant Gratuity Tucci speaking from Federal vessel Biggety,” she says in exhausted and annoyed Galactic Standard. “What do you want.”

The vidscreen stays dark, but a voice asks from the speakers, “Uh… are you okay?”

There’s a distinctly Earth accent to the Galactic Standard, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything; it could be a translator set to an odd speech pattern. Tip met a Fluvonian once who set xir translator to a Southern Elbtos accent, even though Southern Elbtos is all desert and Fluvonians are an underwater species. It takes all kinds to make a galaxy.

“Excuse me?” Tip asks. “Were you _there_ for the part where you crashed into us with your ship?”

“You were stopped in the middle of the Antennae Cascade! Nobody stops in the middle of the Antennae Cascade!”

“We were _paused_ ,” Tip grumbles. She checks that Biggety isn’t transmitting video before she lets herself make a face at the screen. “And since we were _paused_ , why didn’t you see us on your radar, huh?”

For a moment, the only thing that comes through the speakers is a tiny crackle of static. “Okay, we were maaaybe having a tiny problem at the time with some of our… systems.”

“Uh huh,” Tip says. “Typical. Problem with your systems, and now I’m never going to see my cat again. Great.”

“Hey, we — wait, your cat? What happened to your cat?”

“He was being stolen, not that it is mattering to you,” Oh interjects grumpily. He’s got his arms crossed, which is definitely something he picked up from Tip’s mom.

“We had them in our sights, and then when you hit us we lost their trail,” Tip says.

The speakers crackle with a brief, indistinguishable chatter — two distinct voices whispering out of range, which is being mostly picked up as hissing. After a second, it clears up. “Would you like help?”

“...what?” Tip asks.

“Well, we have _really_ good tracking systems, and it sucks that you lost your cat,” the voice says. “Can you let us in? This might be easier if we can talk face-to-face, and our… tiny problem temporarily screwed up our camera.”

“I don’t even know who you are,” Tip says, suspicious.

“Pirates!” another voice yells from the speakers. “Also heroes!”

“Oh, yeah! My name’s Lilo,” the first voice says. “That’s Stitch. We do a lot of things.”

Tip swivels to stare at Oh, who stares back at her, “Yeah,” she says, trying to sound calm and collected. “We can let you in.”

-

Tip hadn’t heard of Lilo Pelekai until about two years After Boov, when the Boov finally became members of the Galactic Federation. 

Not that it was quite that simple. 

The Federation representative had arrived a year after the invasion, for one thing, and they hadn’t just come asking, “Hey, Boov, how would you feel about joining 75% of the galaxy and getting some great interplanetary tax benefits out of it?” (Apparently they’d tried that at least five times in the past fifty years. The Boov had run away every time.)

No, this time they’d been furious. Kyle had panicked when the representative showed up and sent for Oh, who was hanging out with Tip at the time, which was how Tip had gotten a front row seat to a 10-foot-tall lion man haranguing the Boov for invading and disturbing an ecosystem that was under the direct protection of the Galactic Council. 

There had been a few things about mosquitos being an endangered species that Tip hadn’t quite understood, but some guy named Cobra Bubbles who showed up mysteriously after an hour had given her a significant nod and whispered that he’d explain after.

At around hour six, Tip had called a temporary halt to the proceedings because her mom was expecting her and Oh home for dinner. The lion man — Representative Grouna — hadn’t been entirely sure what to do with that. Tip’s mom hadn’t been entirely sure what to do with Grouna and Bubbles joining them for dinner, but she’d rallied faster than Grouna had.

Bubbles had taken the whole thing just as implacably as he’d taken everything else, and helped Tip make some extra rice.

That was day one. Eventually the Galactic Council held a summit, and Tip (because Oh had insisted on her being there) and her mom (because Tip had wanted a human adult in the room other than Cobra Bubbles, and her mom was super smart) were able to make their case that:

  * while it had been a bad start and the Boov had messed a lot of stuff up, 
  * and definitely nobody in the galaxy should be allowed to just go around deciding they owned other people’s planets, 
    * because that was seriously NOT OKAY whether or not the planet was a home for endangered species
      * (and while Tip was at it, Earth had plenty of other non-mosquito endangered species as well, in case the Council was curious)
  * and also ex-Captain Smek had been THE WORST and should definitely never have stolen the Shusher full of tiny baby Gorg, even if he hadn’t known it was full of tiny baby Gorg, because it wasn’t his and that was shitty
  * and did Tip mention that trying to take over someone else’s planet was seriously not okay?
    * and definitely not the sort of thing she wanted to be encouraging, like, at ALL
    * actually something she wanted to do the opposite of encourage, really
  * it seemed both logistically complicated and a little harsh to send all the Boov to space jail forever, especially when
    * except for Oh, none of the Boov were even living on Earth anymore, they’d set up their own places on the moon
    * people on Earth were already figuring out ways to get the Boov to fix what they’d screwed up
    * in the past year they’d actually proven to be super helpful on Earth
      * for example: it turned out Boov drank toxic sludge like it was fine wine, _and_ they had the technology to scoop it out of rivers and oceans without doing more than temporarily confusing a few fish
      * plus, they saw plastic and metal trash as an all-you-can-eat buffet, which Tip had found super useful when she was too lazy to sort out what could be recycled and what couldn’t, and also meant that landfills were actually starting to disappear
      * and they had all sorts of cool flying machines that ran super efficiently on things like slushies and sunlight and farts and their wi-fi was amazing
      * and really, everything that happened at Chicago Pride was very educational, all things considered
    * and oh yeah, Tip and Oh had put in all that effort to SAVE THE PLANET AND EVERYTHING.



She had slides full of statistics and everything. It turned out alien computer systems were surprisingly compatible with PowerPoint.

Anyway, long story short, the Galactic Council had argued for almost literally a year before they’d agreed to let the Boov stay where they were and to allow them in the Galactic Federation on a provisional basis, primarily for the purpose of keeping an eye on them. And _then_ the arguing had started over whether Earth should be allowed into the Galactic Federation or not. 

Afterwards, the Grand Councilwoman had asked if Tip had ever considered intergalactic negotiation as a career choice.

And that had been when Cobra Bubbles chuckled and said, “You know, she’s bound to run into Lilo if she does that. Are you sure you’re ready for that, Grand Councilwoman?”

The Grand Councilwoman had shuddered and said, “Lilo Pelekai is not the one I’m worried about.”

That was the first time. In the eight years since then, Tip has heard the names “Lilo and Stitch” — intergalactic heroes, mischief-makers, bounty hunters, and sometimes pirates — said in awed, amused, aggravated, angry, appalled, affectionate, accusing, admiring, agitated, alarmed, and astonished tones. The one thing she’s never heard anyone be about Lilo and Stitch is ambivalent.

Also, people seem to have this weird thing about not wanting them to meet Tip and Oh. Tip’s not sure why.

-

The only physical descriptions Tip has heard of Lilo and Stitch all boil down to essentially “that tiny blue monster and the Earth woman who hangs out with him.” It’s not that Tip had ever spent, say, a few hours total trying to picture Lilo in her head, but if she had, she would have imagined someone about a foot taller than Tip, with broad shoulders and a wardrobe comprised mostly of leather. Maybe an eyepatch or something.

Instead, Lilo turns out to be a few years older and only a little taller than Tip, who inherited her mother’s (lack of) height. She has a bright smile and a round nose, and below her flowered shirt and shorts are the legs of someone who does even more sprinting from danger than Tip does — which is pretty impressive, since Tip sprints from danger at least once a week and her quadriceps are freaking amazing. She is… really, really distractingly pretty. 

She’s almost pretty enough, in fact, to distract from Stitch, who is — as described —bright blue and about knee-high. He’s also hissing at Oh so hard that he’s actually spitting a little.

“Hi!” Lilo says. “I’m Lilo, Standard Galactic Pronouns she/her. This is Stitch, Standard Galactic Pronouns he/him, mostly out of habit I think. Just don’t call him it, he really doesn’t like that.”

“Boov,” Stitch growls.

“Yes,” Oh says warily, backing up a step. “I am Boov. It is… good to meet you?”

“Boov,” Stitch growls again.

“That is not being my name,” Oh says, taking another step backwards. Boov pods make them very good at shuffling away slowly and carefully; Tip has never been sure whether it’s an evolutionary advantage or not.

“Uh, is there a problem here?” Tip asks.

“Boov,” Stitch growls a third time, and pounces. Oh squawks and runs, narrowly avoiding the trajectory of Stitch’s leap. Stitch crashes to the ground but, undeterred, picks himself up and starts running after Oh.

“Hey!” Tip shouts. “Leave him alone!”

“I didn’t realize you traveled with a Boov,” Lilo says cheerfully, watching Stitch start chasing Oh around the room, claws out and teeth bared. “Sorry, we came back to Kauaʻi in the middle of the Boov invasion, it wasn’t really a good time. Stitch still holds a grudge.”

“Grudge? You crash into us, you come onto our ship, and you tell me he has a _grudge_? He’s trying to kill my best friend!” Tip whirls around and stomps off, trying to find the net they keep in the bridge. 

Lilo follows her. “Stitch would never kill anyone,” she protests, sounding awfully offended for someone whose best friend looks like he’s ready and willing to chomp Tip’s best friend in half. “He’s just trying to freak him out a little.”

“Does his idea of freaking out include maiming?” Tip demands. Now that she thinks about it, the net might still be in their “please fix me” box after the cannibal butterfly invasion on Tyrocco, which means that it’s not only all the way across the ship but also completely unusable. “Because I don’t know what planets you’ve been hanging out on, but where I come from that’s considered rude.”

Lilo sighs, cups her hands around her mouth, and shouts, “STITCH! YOU’RE NOT GOING TO HURT —” She turns to Tip. “Standard Galactic Pronouns?”

“Mostly he/him, except on official Boov holidays. Boov gender doesn’t standardize well.”

“Is today a holiday?”

“No, you’re good.”

“STITCH, YOU’RE NOT GOING TO HURT HIM, RIGHT?”

Stitch skids to a halt, sighs exaggeratedly back at Lilo, and says, “No,” with deep and disgusted resignation.

Oh, who had _not_ skidded to a half and had continued on his circular path of the room, is now through the predictability of geometry running directly at Stitch’s back. Stitch promptly takes advantage of this by turning around and running straight at Oh, who spins in the opposite direction so quickly that he has to dance hastily around on his pods to keep from falling over. 

“We’ve been working on his anger management,” Lilo says proudly.

“Uh huh,” Tip says, managing to sound almost as endlessly dubious as she feels. “Look, it’s not like I don’t get it. The invasion was… sad-mad. I was there.” She still has nightmares sometimes about her mom getting sucked away from her, about what would’ve happened if she and Oh had never met. “But don’t you think we’re freaked out enough already? I mean, my cat got stolen and we don’t even know where the Cnath are! They could be anywhere!”

Lilo consults a little gizmo at her waist. “Actually they’re probably somewhere in the Hyperboolean vector. We should be able to narrow it down in a few minutes.”

Tip blinks at her. “You what?”

“Our trackers are trying to pin down the ship that took your cat. I set the parameters before we boarded your ship, it just takes a little while to triangulate.”

Tip squints at her. She seems sincere, but Ambassador Mri’kri’sri’tvi seemed sincere about his phobia of carnivorous plants and look how that turned out.

“How do I know I can trust you?”

Lilo shrugs. “The Grand Councilwoman knows where I live? Also, it doesn’t sound like you have any better ideas.”

Tip tries not to groan. It’s not like Lilo is wrong. “You’re really tracking down those cat stealing jerks right now?”

Lilo nods. “Yup.”

“And you promise Stitch isn’t going to hurt him? Because if he does—”

“I _promise_ ,” Lilo says intently, the way Tip promises Oh that nobody’s ever going to split them up or promises her mom that she’ll be home safe in a month. “Besides, your friend is doing pretty good.”

Tip considers them. Stitch is faster than Oh and he’s got those claws, but Oh knows where all the tubs of bolts, paint, and cat food tins are, so they do seem pretty evenly matched. 

Stitch dodges a shower of slushee mix, and Tip winces. That’s going to be sticky to clean up later.

“I mean, I guess — wait,” she says belatedly. “Did you say you were from Kauaʻi? As in Hawaii? Were you part of The Awfulling Thing We Are Never To Be Talking About On The Land Bits In The Water?”

“The what?” Lilo asks.

“Oh my god,” Tip marvels. “I’ve _never_ been able to get any of the Boov who were there to tell me what happened. It’s like an urban legend. If you even mention Hawaii to most Boov they run away.”

“Most of that was probably my sister,” Lilo says proudly. “Maybe a little bit Jumba and Pleakley. Jumba has this shield over the islands, it activated when the Boov came. Nani usually doesn’t let us play with the rayguns, but she really doesn’t like it when people try to force her to go places.”

“...The rayguns,” Tip says. “Your sister had rayguns at her house?”

“Oh, yeah,” Lilo says. “It’s really hard to stop Jumba from making them. He says once a mad scientist, always a mad scientist. He has to keep them in a special shed so the house doesn’t explode again, though.”

“The house _exploded_?” Tip feels weirdly relieved with herself. Whatever other kinds of trouble she and Oh have gotten up to over the years, at least their house never exploded. 

Sure, she swung the Eiffel Tower through a few buildings, but there were extenuating circumstances there and no explosions were involved whatsoever, mostly. Definitely only in a very controlled way, if they were.

Oh yanks down a colander full of malt balls, which flips over and gets stuck halfway over Stitch’s eyes. Stitch pauses, eats a malt ball, and hums consideringly before going back to sprinting. The colander keeps slipping down over his eyes like a too-big crown.

“Only once!” Lilo says. “Or maybe twice. The other time wasn’t our fault.”

“Man,” Tip says, shaking her head. “And I thought I had a weird time during the Boov invasion. Cobra Bubbles didn’t mention _any_ of this.”

Lilo raises her eyebrows. “You know Cobra Bubbles?”

“Yeah?” Tip says. “He kinda just showed up when the first Galactic Federation representative did. Does he do that with you too? Because it gets way weird.”

Lilo peers at her more closely. “Wait. What did you say your name was again?”

“Me? My friends call me Tip. That’s — OH, SLIDE!” she shouts as Oh, craning his head around to see how close Stitch is, comes perilously close to smacking into the bottom of the ladder leading to the loft deck. 

“Oh?” Stitch asks, stopping stock-still so abruptly that Oh, who had slid just barely under the ladder, finishes a full circuit and crashes directly into him.

“Did you say Tip?” Lilo says.

Tip runs forward to help Oh up, but Stitch beats her to it. He carefully lifts Oh up, sets him back on his pods, and starts to dust him off so assiduously that Oh starts rotating in confusion.

“Tip, what is this happening?” he asks frantically.

“Okay, okay, enough,” Tip says, carefully judging her moment and then darting forward to yank Oh a safe ten feet away from Stitch. “Guys? Are we done now?”

Stitch and Lilo look at each other, Lilo’s eyebrows moving wildly. Stitch makes a face like a wrinkled lemon. Lilo nods exaggeratedly at him. Stitch opens his mouth wide, lolling his tongue out, and staggers around pretending to be choking. Lilo waves her hands wildly. Stitch sighs, dragging his hands down his face. Lilo wrinkles her nose and pulls her mouth to one side.

Tip clears her throat, and they spin forward guiltily.

“Stitch is sorry,” Stitch says to Oh, tucking his hands behind his back. “Stitch didn’t know you were Oh.”

Tip and Oh look at each other. Tip raises her eyebrows at Oh. He makes his confused face, his mouth pursed and his brow ridges furrowed. Tip tilts her head. Oh flicks through stripes of red, green, and white, and then shrugs. Tip shrugs back. He jerks his head at her.

“You’ve heard of us?” Tip asks. 

“Uh,” Lilo says, “yeah.”

“ _Obviously_ ,” Stitch says.

A loud trill sounds through the room, coming from approximately Lilo’s hip. She beams. “Hey, our tracker’s working!”

-

According to Lilo, she and Stitch have been hearing about Tip and Oh but never meeting them for around as long as the reverse has been happening.

“I mean, first it was just after the invasion, because Jumba tapped into the news and found out that a human girl and a Boov stopped the Gorg ship before it destroyed the planet, but then the Grand Councilwoman kept talking about you and then shutting up whenever we came in the room,” Lilo says, holding her tiny trilling device up and looking at it. “What kind of connector cables do you have? We’re hooked up to our ship but it’ll be easier if we can just plug it into your Galactic Positioning System.”

“Ours is broken,” Stitch says helpfully, as Tip opens the drawer full of miscellaneous connector cables. Stitch dives in, sorting through with two paws and occasionally tossing rejects over his shoulder with a disapproving _meh!_

“Uh huh,” Tip says, her eyebrows raised. “Your tiny problem?”

“No, I think it happened when we crashed. I noticed when we were hooking ourselves up to your docking bay,” Lilo says. “It was always sort of glitchy anyway.”

“I know how that goes,” Tip says. “Anytime our old ship Bubblore passed a red dwarf, the GPS would freak out and start spitting out bingo cards for five minutes.”

“Luckily, they was being recyclable,” Oh adds. He’s still watching Stitch dubiously, but even that can’t keep him from one of his favorite activities: gleefully explaining things to people.

“Yeah, if you shoved ’em back in by hand!” Tip says, prodding him in the shoulder.

Lilo laughs. “Bingo cards?”

“The old folks’ home near my place got rid of some old stuff when they got a new building, so they let Oh go through to see if he could use anything,” Tip says. “We started the first Bin-to-Boov recycling program in Chicago, you know.”

Tip is definitely focusing very hard on the radar and not looking at all in Lilo’s direction, but she can’t help but notice out of the corner of her eye that Lilo seems a little impressed.

“It is astonishable the things that humans are throwing away!” Oh says. “I made two whole Boov Hot Blowing Rooms for myself and Second Best Friend Kyle out of the bathrooms.”

“It was the old hand dryers,” Tip clarifies. “It’s kind of like a Boov sauna.” She’s been in once or twice, but for the most part it’s an experience she’s happy to leave Oh to do on his own. Lying down while repurposed hand dryers and blow dryers gently waft air across her feels more weird than invigorating.

“Hot air is good for Boov complexion,” Oh says.

“Wow,” Lilo says. “When we use recycled equipment, our GPS just forgets that moons exist.”

Stitch sighs. “Never should’ve taken Jumba and Pleakley’s old stuff.”

“Yours sounds more fun,” Lilo tells Tip. “But on the bright side, we’re really good at sudden turns now.”

Tip snorts. “Oh yeah? Tell that to the dent on my ship,” she teases. “I don’t care how cool you are, we’re definitely still calling your insurance.”

“You think I’m cool?” Lilo asks, smiling a little.

Tip meets her eyes and then looks away, trying to keep her smile down. “I mean. You’re okay.”

Lilo grins at her brightly enough tense not through thoughts of dents and repairs and space insurance, Tip can't help but smile back. She wonders how much trouble Lilo gets out of this way.

“It’s not a big dent,” Lilo wheedles. “You’re pretty big and we’re pretty small. You should be glad our ship is mostly crash-proof, that could’ve gone way worse.”

“Yah!” Stitch says. “Have to be crash-proof. Lilo is tiny and breakable.”

“And _somebody_ has a habit of forgetting how to land,” Lilo says pointedly.

“Eh,” Stitch scoffs.

Oh looks up at Tip worriedly. “Are you tiny and breakable? Am I tiny and breakable? Do I need to be reinforcing the shielding?”

“Everyone’s tiny and breakable compared to Stitch, he’s basically indestructible,” Lilo says.

“I did hear about the volcano,” Tip says. Everyone had heard about the volcano. Tip and her mom had had an cheerful debate about whether it still counted as a volcano if space magma had almost none of the same properties as Earth magma. Eventually they’d just decided it was a space volcano and called it a day. “Also the thing on Kiax.”

“Kiax? Really?” Lilo asks, looking pleased. 

“I told you,” Tip says. “We’ve heard about you for, like. Ever. You’re pretty much famous in the Galactic Diplomacy and Crisis Core crew.”

Lilo laughs. “Um, _you’re_ famous. You walked into that standoff on Flynderong without any weapons or anything and you made the Gingelmupf go back to their old planet. Stitch and I were in space jail and we still heard about that one.”

“Tip and I are being very good at our jobs,” Oh says proudly.

Tip pats him on the shoulder but can’t help saying, a little glumly, “At least, I _thought_ we were, until the Cnath totally wigged out on us and stole my cat.”

Lilo shrugs. “Maybe they really like cats.”

Tip furrows her eyebrows, considering that. There’s something —

“Haha!” Stitch yells, brandishing a bright green cable. Tip has no idea where they picked that one up; the cords in their cable drawer, miscellaneous wire bits in their junk drawer, and left socks in their sock drawer seem to multiply when she’s not watching.

“Ahhhhhh!” Oh yells, pattering across to the GPS console. “Over here!” He waves one arm until Stitch grabs the trilling device and scampers over. Oh carefully plugs the cable into the Galactic Positioning System and the screen flares to life, spreading out a holographic map of space and two tiny blinking dots: one for their current position, and one for the Cnath ship.

It’s docked at the Cnath palace in the Cnath capital city. Tip, rueful, feels like she maybe should have expected that one.

“Alright,” she says, cracking her knuckles. “So what’s the plan?”

Lilo and Stitch look at each other. “Plan?” They ask simultaneously.

Tip feels a weird lurch in her stomach. “Oh,” she says, trying to ignore it. “I’d thought — but you’re right, this isn’t really your business. Thank you for letting us use your trackers, let me know when you need me to open the bay doors back up —”

Stitch climbs up a chair carefully until he can gently press a hand — paw? Hand? — over her mouth. “Shush,” he says. “Of course Stitch and Lilo will break into palace and help you steal tiny cat back. Is what we do.”

“He is actually being a pretty bigly cat,” Oh says. “And fluffy.”

Stitch rolls his eyes. “Yah, okay,” he says, but still kindly. “We help you steal big fluffy cat back. Easier to find.”

Tip turns to look at Lilo, who grins bright enough for an entire star system and strokes her chin thoughtfully. “You want a plan? We can give you a plan.”

-

This is what the plan ends up involving:

  * 3 coils of rope
  * 1 can of peas
  * 2 pounds of marbles
  * 1 incredibly elaborate sound system
  * The lingering and oddly disorienting feeling that Tip should be in a montage right now
  * A copy of the blueprints of the Cnath palace which Tip had been given when she agreed to mediate between the Cnath and the Prim, because they were technically considered evidence because something something crime
    * 4 minutes of confused staring at the unnecessarily confusing layout of the Cnath palace, which Tip could only describe as resembling a conch shell on acid
  * The panicked realization that they know where the ship is but not where Pig is
  * Oh bemoaning the fact that they’ve never put a tracker on Pig’s collar
  * A hastily-rigged system for detecting cat fur
    * Which may be the most grateful Tip has ever been for the fact that Pig sheds all over her bed
  * Tip and Lilo inventing a system of hand signals
    * Tip and Lilo remembering halfway through that Stitch and Oh only have four fingers
      * Tip and Lilo quickly inventing a new system of hand signals
  * 3 different costumes, 1 of which is even convincing
  * 1 very illegal parking job
  * 1 very conveniently unlocked gate
    * 1 very disappointed Stitch, who reluctantly put away his laser cutter
    * 1 very disappointed Lilo, who reluctantly put away _her_ laser cutter
  * Stitch crawling through two separate vents
  * Oh carefully dancing his way across a pressure sensor as he follows the muted lights of the cat-detector
  * Tip grumbling about how much she wants to punch all three of the palace’s architects even though all three are already dead
  * Too many near-misses to count, as they narrowly evade Cnath officials running frantically through the halls on some mission or another
  * Too many ceilings for Tip’s overall peace of mind



Somewhere back on Earth, Tip’s mom is shaking her head in bemusement and has no idea why.

Tip could live without the ceilings, honestly. They're sturdy and reasonably clean, as ceilings go, and she's hardly scared of heights, but her harness right now is tangled up in places no harness should go.

Lilo, meanwhile, is picking the lock on an ornate door while humming Jailhouse Rock. She’s been humming Elvis fairly consistently through the entire break-in, but Jailhouse Rock has been a consistent feature. Tip guesses she can understand why.

“I’m going to have Elvis stuck in my head for the next month,” she murmurs; the room is empty, or she wouldn’t be talking at all, but there’s no harm in being careful.

Although she supposes if they were _really_ being careful, they wouldn’t have sent Stitch off to circle around with Oh.

“Elvis,” Lilo says just as quietly, “is the King.”

“He’s fine, I guess,” Tip says. 

Lilo looks briefly outraged. “Fine?!”

“Well,” Tip says, hanging upside-down like Spiderman and smirking just the tiniest bit, “he’s no Rihanna.”

“He’s no—!” Lilo sputters. “He’s _Elvis_.” She shoots Tip a sideways glance. “You’re lightheaded. This is just what happens when the blood rushes to your head. We’ll talk about this when you’re rightside-up again and you’ll see.”

“Yeah, I’ll see how wrong you are,” Tip says. She’s feeling kind of flushed. Maybe Lilo is onto something with the upside-down thing — although definitely not about Elvis being better than Rihanna.

Suddenly, Lilo pauses with the stillness of a hunter, pressing her ear to the door in front of her. She beckons Tip down with a nod of her head, their hand signals useless now that both her hands are full. 

Tip swings silently out of the ceiling and lowers herself to the ground, unhooking her harness and slipping it into her bag. Lilo mouths, ‘Is that your cat?’

Tip presses her ear to the door and hears a faint murmur of voices — and between them, the noise of a discontented Pig. She nods at Lilo.

‘Now?’ Lilo mouths, and when Tip nods again, she swings open the door. 

The room is huge and imposing, covered in elaborately-shaped furniture and long ribbons with beams of light cutting through the room and coming seemingly from nowhere. It's also filled with Cnath in high court attire, arms encased in fleecy ribbons and at least one leg covered in gold bands. Tip barely pays attention to any of that, because there Pig is, lying on a golden plinth while a swarm of nervous Cnath hover over him.

Which is kind of weird, but Tip is willing to roll with it.

“Pig!” she shouts, running forward.

“Trespassers!” someone shouts. Tip spares them a cursory look and them frowns, because they look awfully like the Premier of Cnathan, from the diamond-shaped nose to the ancient crown that’s almost as tall as Oh. “Bernagen-melycia, take him!”

One member of the court snatches Pig up and flees towards a side door, ignoring Pig’s protesting meow. Before they can get to the door, though, it opens for them, and Oh and Stitch step through.

“Uh-uh,” Stitch says, holding a raygun like someone who could be very casual about its use. “Wouldn't do that.”

Tip’s had Pig since he was a kitten, so tiny he was tripping over his own paws. He was the first thing that made her feel at home in Chicago, this ball of fluff that adores her, this little cat who became a big cat who just wanted to lie across her lap or curl up on Oh’s head. He’s been there with her through everything, from invasions to college finals to that weird ceremony that the Yopraing swore would increase Pig’s lifespan tenfold. 

And now here he is, caged in by all three of Bernagen-melycia’s arms, squirming unhappily as he tries to drop to the floor.

She inhales deeply, and exhales. Tip doesn’t usually think of herself as a very angry person, but everyone has exceptions. Tip’s got three.

“Let. Go. Of. My. Cat,” she says.

Bernagen-melycia drops Pig. As soon as he hits the ground, he runs to Tip, jumping up into her waiting arms and purring up a storm.

Tip turns her glare on another familiar face. “Ambassador Deylitona-view-axon, you have a _lot_ to answer for.”

The ambassador tries to edge backwards, her face turning an anxious purple. “I don’t know about what you are talking!”

“Yeah, right,” Tip scoffs.

“Enough!” the Premier shouts. “Guards! Arrest these trespassers!”

“Oh, no you don’t,” Tip says. “Under Article 14 of the Code of Cnathan, a minor crime is not legally punishable if it's a justifiable retaliation for a larger crime. Yeah, I walked into your house. But you? I am a representative of the Galactic Council who came to you in good faith, and you _stole my family_.”

The motley crowd of nobles and guards gasps.

“This?” the ambassador asks guiltily. “Oh, no, this is a… cat different… Certainly not your cat. You have a cat? What is a cat?”

Tip inhales again, and exhales again.

“I am hearing the deep breathing, but I am not seeing the calm face,” she distantly hears Oh tell Stitch.

“This is a cat,” Tip says. “ _My_ cat. Which you knew, because I introduced you when you docked at my ship two days ago. And not only did you screw up the peace process _you_ were trying to arrange, you’ve broken Galactic Standard 304.93 about the treatment of international diplomats and their companions. You know what I could do to you for that?”

The ambassador blanches. Someone in the crowd whimpers quietly, “I never even got to touch the creature fluffy!”

Queen Silas makes a face like she's chewing on mud. “Your knowledge of our laws is commendable,” she says, like she's spitting out that mud. “Order undone, guards. Deylitona?”

The ambassador drops to her third knee and presses her hands to her head, fingers facing out. “Justified your actions, undone my offense,” she whispers, nervously but formally.

Tip crosses her arms and does the stern face she stole directly from her mom. “Apology _not_ accepted. Why did you steal my cat? And also, how dare you?”

“So fuzzy it was,” the ambassador wails. “And the noises! The noises tiny that vibrate! The chirps happy! The nudges against the hands! The softness! We could not help it!”

There's a murmur of miserable agreement across the room, from both courtiers and guards. Even Queen Silas softens minutely when she looks at Pig in Tip’s arms.

As Tip is considering this — that the Cnath, terrible neighbors, pickiest citizens of the galaxy, fell so desperately in love with her cat in less than 48 hours that they stole him — Oh comes over to join her. Pig happily moves from Tip’s arms to his favorite spot on the top of Oh’s head, and a murmured “Awwwwwwwwww” reverberates through the room.

Oh looks at Tip and taps his chin. Tip looks at Oh and raises her eyebrows. Oh wrinkles his nose. Tip tilts her head. As one, they nod.

“Do you even know anything about cats?” she demands. “What they eat? What they like?”

“We were going to search on the intergalacticnet,” the ambassador says in a tiny voice.

Oh scoffs. “For documents in Earth-speak? Haves you _tried_ putting those through Galoodle Translate? It is impossibility! Do you know how many languages they are having?”

“ _And_ you don't even know which sources are good,” Tip says, and lets herself pause for one anticipatory moment. “But I do.”

Queen Silas looks at her with wide eyes. Ambassador Deylitona-view-axon looks up with sudden hope.

“Pig is off-limits,” Tip clarifies. “He's my family. He stays with Oh and me. But there are some cats on Earth who don't have families, who might let you adopt them — _if_ you agree to peace talks with the Prim to the GDCC’s satisfaction, and _if_ everyone who so much as thinks about owning a cat has at least... six weeks of training with an Earth expert. And the experts going to need to make sure this place is cat friendly, and you’re going to have to hire a veterinarian until your doctors learn enough, because I'm not bringing any cats here unless I know they're gonna be safe.”

“Cats?” Queen Silas asks worshipfully. “Multiple cats?”

Tip has a feeling this is going to work out okay after all.

-

“That was,” Lilo says, several hours later when the five of them — Pig included, of course — finally have some time to themselves on Biggety. “Wow. You’re even better at yelling at people until they do what you want than Nani is, and Nani is _really good_ at it.”

Tip feels herself blush, and is grateful that it will barely show. “That’s what we do. Well, sometimes. Sometimes there's more running for our lives.”

“Yeah, I wondered,” Lilo says, looking at Tip’s legs for just a second too long before flicking her gaze back up hastily. Stitch snickers behind her; he and Oh seem to be bonding over a weird gizmo Oh picked up in the palace, but apparently that's not distracting enough to keep either of them from listening in.

“So, uh,” Tip says. “I guess you’ll be leaving soon?”

“Oh. I guess,” Lilo says, scuffing one foot behind her. “I mean, we don’t really have to be anywhere immediately. But it sounds like you’ll be kinda busy for the next little while.”

“Pretty busy,” Tip says, linking her hands behind her back. “With everything. But mostly during the day, probably.”

She needs to actually sort out the mediation between the Cnath and the Prim now that they’ve both re-agreed to it, first of all, and by the time she’s got that going the cat experts and veterinarians she had to call and ask the Earth Liaison Council for will have already arrived with the first ship full of rescue cats. They’ll take care of running the mandatory six weeks of cat-ownership training, but Tip and Oh or another GCCD consultant should still be around to supervise that and make sure the Cnath don’t backslide once they’ve got tiny little purring things.

She thinks they won’t, though. She remembers her first few years of cat ownership: she didn’t want to do anything other than coo at Pig and take pictures of him.

Stitch snorts. “Stupid,” he says dismissively. “Stitch is staying here so Oh can fix the ship.”

Tip looks at Oh. “You're doing what?”

Oh looks cautiously pleased with himself. “It would be irresponsibling to let them go out with broken radar to crash into more people's ships,” he says. “And haves you seen how inefficient their engine is? The fuel is not even being recyclable!”

“When did you decide this?” Tip asks, her eyebrows raised. They’ve been surrounded by diplomats, lawyers, and time-wasters all day; she would’ve noticed if Oh and Stitch were slipping off to discuss engineering.

“When we were breaking into the palace,” Oh says off-handedly. “Why, what were you discussing?”

“Uh,” Tip says. “Music?”

“Tip doesn’t like Elvis,” Lilo offers. Stitch frowns at Tip immediately.

Tip shoves her lightly in the arm. “That’s not _exactly_ what I said.”

“I’m going to make you a mixtape,” Lilo threatens. “Just wait.”

Nobody’s ever made Tip a mixtape before. She tries not to smile too much. “I’ve got time,” she says a little too quickly,and has to add, “...And you’ll need it, because I’m never, ever going to agree he’s better.”

“Then I guess it’s a good thing we’re staying,” Lilo says. “If we’re not going to get in the way.”

In a day or so, Biggety is going to be full of ambassadors and lawyers arguing constantly; a few days later, there will probably be cats everywhere. Tip is going to need to constantly be checking in with the GDCC to update them on her progress. 

“It’ll be fine,” she says. “I mean… after all this time hearing about you, it would be a shame if you had to go so soon.”

“That's true. And before we even got into any real trouble!” Lilo says. 

Tip raises an eyebrow. “Breaking into a palace to steal back a cat wasn’t enough trouble for you? You know this place still has to be in one peace if we’re going to actually sign a treaty, right?”

Lilo just winks at her. “Come on, Stitch, if we’re staying we should go skype Nani. And maybe Jumba, I want to make sure nothing’s going to explode if you touch the engine.”

“Ruining my fun,” Stitch sulks, but he gets up and follows Lilo out anyway.

There's a moment of silence, and then Lilo sticks her head back through the doorway. “I'm glad we crashed into your ship,” she says, and then darts off again. 

Tip blinks. “Oh,” she says. “I mean — thank you! Me too? I mean — aaand I’m talking to an empty hallway, aren’t I.

She shakes her head, smiling a little goofily, and flops down into a nearby chair, sprawling out with her head tilted back so she can stare at the ceiling.

Now that she notices it, they really need to clean the ceiling.

There’s a whirring noise to her right. Tip knows exactly what it is, even before she turns her head to look. Ever since they had to leave Slushious's automatic seats in Chicago, Oh has insisted on all of their chairs having tiny motors, specifically so that he can slide slowly up next to her while smiling his widest smile. In the past few years, he’s started adding in an eyebrow waggle as well, despite not really having much in the way of eyebrows. Tip blames her Mom.

“No,” she says pre-emptively.

“But you don’t even know what I was going to be saying!” Oh asks.

“No,” Tip repeats. 

“Tiiiiiip,” Oh says.

“Nope.”

“Tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip.”

Tip asks abruptly, partially out of self-preservation, “Do you think this is a bad idea?” 

It’s a weak segue but for now it’s enough to distract Oh, who spins his chair a thoughtless 180 as he visibly tries to marshall his thoughts. He's not smiling anymore but he is glowing orange in stripes, which seems like a good sign. 

“We haves Pig cat back,” Oh says thoughtfully. “We can to fixing whatever else breaks. Or explodes.”

Years ago, when Tip was deciding whether or not to go to college on a different planet and whether or not to go into Official Space Diplomacy Crisis Negotiation Aliens Being Ridiculously Demanding business and whether or not to take up the Grand Councilwoman’s job offer, she spent ages talking it over with her mom and Oh. She hadn’t wanted him to feel obligated to come with her even though they were best friends forever, but he insisted, so she was sure as heck going to make sure they were both going in the right direction.

Tip’s mom had pointed out that it was a chance to keep other aliens from trying to take over any planets, and that she’d at least had a lot of experience so far, but that it was never too late to choose a new path if she needed one.

Oh had said, “Diplomacy is like the whole universe is waiting to be our friends!”

“Yeah,” Tip says now, more than six years later, and so many days since she’d made the best friend she’s ever had in the weirdest few days she’s ever lived through. “I guess we can.”


End file.
